Carte Blanche

The first headline to finally cut through the President Trump news tsunami on my feeds was “Mosul battle: IS hangs bodies of 40 civilians from poles in Iraqi city, UN says” on November 11th. The Daesh are feeling the heat and are reacting as classic fascists do; killing civilians, getting teenagers and children to suit up and do their dirty work, sending out the suicide bombers into the markets of the unarmed and defenceless as only cowards can do. Are they finished? It’s very difficult to wipe out an ideology. You can beat it back but the latent period will end eventually. An entrenched idea will inevitably regain traction in the greater consciousness. Sometimes it’s a slow burn and other times it’s as if a switch has been flicked. Trump is insistent he is going to take care of ISIS but he seems to have unleashed a taste of an American version called MAGA. The Make America Great Again goons are on the loose and feel that they have free reign until at least 2020. Those that remember America prior to the Civil Rights era will recognize MAGAland instantly.

Locally, somebody got their head cuffed in our own University Centre for wearing a MAGA hat. They took to Facebook to whine a bit about “freedom of expression” and caused a fairly heated on line debate. It sounds like this MAGA person wasn’t trying to be an ironic type. Bass Pro Shop hats are plentiful but if you are in a quest for a rarer hat to score hipster points then a MAGA hat might not be the one to wear. The only similarity between the two is that they are both made in China. Up here and especially at a university, MAGA gear acts as a signalling device to say “I hope some SJW takes a shot at me so I can complain about them”. I prefer to approach these things verbally but completely understand should a more visceral reaction be delivered from one young person to another. These days, wearing a MAGA hat in Canada is a not so subtle way of telling a certain subset of the population to fuck off. You can’t deny that is the intention. You might as well put a swastika on your sleeve. Thankfully we are in Canada and no one died in the altercation. The trolls beat on each other for days though.

Down south the crappy spelling previously seen on Tea Party protest signs is freely being painted on cars and mosques: “Die Faget! Muslams out!” They seem to be able to spell Trump when they sign their work though. The president elect has given them carte blanche (!) to be bad, as if a (white) frat party spiralled out of control and the cops are standing on the margins chuckling at the “fun”. Pop the Tic Tacs and go for it, they wont touch you. In an elevator at Canisius College just across the border in Buffalo, someone took a black toy baby doll and lashed it to the railing to simulate a lynching. How would anyone feel walking into that? How long until the hanging of a doll morphs into something a little more “IS hangs bodies of 40 civilians from poles in Iraqi city”? In a nation with 300 million guns under the beds, it might not be long. Thankfully, it can’t happen here. Or can it?